Matthew Kelly, left, and George Costigan in a 2003 production of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men at the King's Theatre, Edinburgh. Should the novel still be part of the school curriculum? ON the topic of dubious books disappearing from the school curriculum (“Goodbye y’all: School calls time on ‘dated’ Mockingbird and Mice”, and “Blyton racism row rages on”, The Herald, July 5) who wrote the following, and of whom? "He impressed me greatly – the sense he gave one of huge but crippled power, the reedy voice and the banal words in which he tried to express ideas which represented for him a whole world of incoherent poetry. I did not know him well enough to like or dislike him, but I felt him as one feels the imminence of a thunderstorm. But I did not realise the greatness of his personality until I had been some time in the country. Then I felt that in all sorts of people – simple farmers and transport riders, commonplace business men, Jewish financiers who otherwise would have had no thought but for their bank accounts, even trivial, intriguing politicians – he had kindled some spark of his own idealism. He had made them take long views. Common as their minds might be, some window had been opened which gave them a prospect. They had acquired at least a fragment of a soul. If it be not genius thus to brood over a land and have this power over the human spirit, then I do not understand the meaning of the word."